The book for this month’s IndieWeb Book Club , hosted by Nick, is Christopher Alexander’s book The Timeless Way of Building . The book is about architecture, but its principles have broader application to any discipline involved with building something. The idea of a “pattern language”, discussed throughout the book, is one that has stuck with me. I was thinking about “patterns” before reading the book, but The Timeless Way of Building put the idea of a pattern into perspective: Yo...

Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new session. Rahul Garg explains how Context Anchoring externalizes the decision context into a living document. more… Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new session. Rahul Garg explains how Context Anchoring ex...

In my “ closing thoughts ” post about the phone usage experiment, I mentioned I had deeper thoughts I wanted to share. Here I am, sharing those thoughts. I ran various month-long life experiments over the years, many of which I chronicled here on this blog. For that reason, the outcome of this recent phone experiment wasn’t a surprise: if I make the conscious decision to pay attention to some specific aspect of my life, there’s a high likelihood I’ll manage to enact significant changes...

Hey all, quick update continuing from yesterday's announcement that my homelab went down. This is stream of consciousness and unedited. Enjoy! Turns out the entire homelab didn't go down and two Kubernetes nodes survived the power outage somehow. Two Kubernetes controlplane nodes. Kubernetes really wants there to be an odd number of controlplane nodes and my workloads are too heavy for any single node to run and Longhorn really wants there to be at least three nodes...

.article-entry img { max-height: 360px; width: auto; max-width: 100%; margin: 1.5rem auto; display: block; border-radius: 8px; } I’ve learned over the years that shipping fast compounds exponentially only if you’re also learning fast. .article-entry img { max-height: 360px; width: auto; max-width: 100%; margin: 1.5rem auto; display: block; border-radius: 8px; } I’ve learned over the years that shipping fast compounds exponentially only if you’re also learning fast.

The top of the Artemis II SLS rocket at its launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with our Moon providing the ultimate backdrop. Bottom left: Artemis II mission crew patch. Images: NASA / Sam Lott / Greg Manchess On February 25, NASA  rolled back  the  SLS rocket  and its attached Orion spacecraft from the vehicle’s launchpad at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to its assembly building about seven kilometers away. Technicians then replaced a dislodged s...

Port of Salalah in Oman on fire following an Iranian drone attack. Via OSINTdefender on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at closure of the Strait of Hormuz, banning build-to-rent homes in the US, Honda’s EV losses, Travis Kalanick’s new company, Corpus Christi’s water crisis, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid ...

I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and computing had applications in so many other fields—fields that, nonetheless, started out as beneficiaries of military largesse. Consider education. The Second World War had a profound ...

So I’ve been thinking, when was the last time I’ve experienced some sort of burnout from a community. And I had forgotten that tech was not my only interest, or the only thing I’ve been deeply enthralled with. While I started making websites when I was 13, I wasn’t always stuck on only thinking about web development as a hobby and career. I used to be quite obsessed with films and filmmaking. I spent a great chunk of my young adulthood watching films and analysing them. I had semesters...

Gilles Brassard and Charlie Bennett Charlie Bennett and Gilles Brassard will receive the 2025 ACM Turing Award  for their work on the foundations of quantum information science, the first Turing award for quantum. Read all about it in The New York Times , Science and Quanta . Bennett and Brassard famously met in the water off a beach during the 1979 FOCS conference in Puerto Rico. That led to years of collaboration, most notably for their quantum secure key distribution protocol . The ...

People like unboxing posts and videos, right? I reckon it’ll also be a fun distraction from the horrendous pain I’m in for a medical misadventure that’s been ongoing for weeks at this point (I’ll be fine thank you, but if you can’t vent on your own blog, where can you?). My new machine just arrived today, and here’s the box in all its cardboard glory, alongside my two current personal laptops. Reassuringly, we have a lithium battery warning, so I’ll be able to use this laptop wit...

I've liked Cryptic Crosswords...somewhat. In the past. They're a bit tricky for me and I haven't really put in the time to be comfortable enough to have fun solving them. Anyway, the Wordle guy has a new website where he aims to teach people how to solve Cryptics. If you're not familiar, Cryptic Crosswords follow a very particular format for their clues. Let's take one of the Parseword examples: Cooked rustic orange (6). The (6) refers to the number of letters in the result. So we...

Back in 2024 I went through the process of losing weight, and was fairly successful . I went from ~111kg (244lbs) to ~103kg (226lbs). My target was 100kg (220lbs), so I got very close. But then, in August 2024, I was promoted in work, ended up working way more hours, and my health suffered. I ended up burned out and ultimately I stepped down a few months ago. Which was honestly the right thing to do . Anyway, for the year or so that I was in that role, my weight slowly crept back up ...

I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood. I built a tiny shell in C to learn what fork, execvp, and dup2 are doing under the hood.

Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP Understanding the social media zeitgeist around CLIs and the premature death of MCP

The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office. The eight-hour work week, its limitations and the importance of living outside the office.

OpenAI today: Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano . These models join GPT-5.4 which was released two weeks ago . OpenAI's self-reported benchmarks show the new 5.4-nano out-performing their previous GPT-5 mini model when run at maximum reasoning effort. The new mini is also 2x faster than the previous mini. Here's how the pricing looks - all prices are per million tokens. gpt-5.4-nano is notably even cheaper than Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite: Model Input ...

WASHINGTON (March 17, 2026)  —  Shield AI today announced the successful completion of autonomous flight tests in collaboration with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI), integrating Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software onto MHI’s  Affordable Rapid‑Prototyping Mitsubishi‑Drone initiative  (ARMD)   in under 60 days. The demonstration underscores how advanced autonomy can be rapi dly developed, in tegrated, tested, and flown in support of  defense-focused autonomous...

Another common question popped up in r/golang: I’ve been reading mixed opinions lately about using context to pass values like request IDs, auth info, or tenant IDs through middleware layers. Some people argue it’s fine and exactly what context was extended for after 1.7. Others say it’s a code smell that leads to hidden dependencies and untestable code. I see both sides. On one hand it keeps function signatures clean. On the other hand you lose compile-time safety and it’s not o...

Gimkit assignments let students practice quiz content on their own time, without a teacher-hosted live session. Teachers set a game mode, a completion goal, and a due date — students play from any device and results appear automatically. This guide covers everything from setup to reading reports. What Are Gimkit Assignments? Gimkit assignments are self-paced sessions tied to a specific kit and game mode. A teacher creates the assignment, sets a cash or question goal, and shares a link. Stu...

When I was a student in grade school biology, before I had an inkling of my destiny to become a clam man, I remember learning about food webs. We learned that one part of the food web was made up of autotrophs (“self feeders”), such as plants and algae, which make their own food via photosynthesis (note that there are autotrophic organisms also using chemosynthesis to make food, but we’ll leave those for another blog). The other main portion of the food web are the heterotrophs (“diffe...

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot! 2026-03-14 12:55 It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking... For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. ...

I started work on Distributed Systems Design by Example exactly 212 days ago. The first draft is now done, and I’ve learned a lot while writing it, just as I learned a lot by writing books on software design in JavaScript and Python . However, I don’t know if I will ever finish this book: people don’t seem to read long-form technical writing any longer, and there several pieces of fiction that I want to get over the finish line. Still, I hope what’s there is useful. I started work ...